Why AI Pioneer Geoffrey Hinton Urges a Pause Before Machines Surpass Humans

AI pioneer says we must stop before AI becomes smarter than humans

On Wednesday, Geoffrey Hinton, one of the "godfathers" of artificial intelligence, urged governments to prevent machines from taking over society. After ten years at Google, Hinton left the company but remains passionate about AI, emphasizing the need to develop multimodal models that combine vision, language, and other cues, while warning of AI risks.

Speaking at the Collision conference in Toronto, Hinton addressed an audience of over 30,000 CEOs, investors, and IT professionals about how to navigate the AI wave rather than ignore its dangers.

He quoted: "Before AI becomes smarter than us, developers should devote massive effort to preventing AI from trying to take control." He also warned that AI could exacerbate wealth inequality, stating that "wealth will flow to the rich, not to the poor, which is harmful to society," and called for AI‑generated content to carry watermarks to label fake material.

The European Union is exploring watermarking in its AI Act. VC investor Sara Guo questioned "regulatory capture," noting that current generative AI giants may retain dominance, while others might break through with new models.

Leigh Marie Braswell predicted that the best, most accurate general models will likely remain in the hands of a few capital‑rich companies. Zachary Bratun‑Glennon foresaw millions of models on the web, similar to today’s websites.

NTT DATA launches a Global Generative AI Lab

NTT DATA, ranked fifth among Fortune Global 500 companies, announced the creation of a Global Generative AI Lab to promote AI use worldwide, develop solutions such as automatic code generation, chatbots, text search, and AI‑powered document reading, and establish ethical and safety guidelines.

Svelte 4 officially released

The popular front‑end framework Svelte has launched version 4.0, a maintenance release that raises minimum version requirements and optimizes design. It reduces bundle size by up to 75% (from 10.6 MB to 2.8 MB) and cuts dependencies from 61 to 16, resulting in faster downloads and a smaller attack surface.

Key improvements include a new default transition setting, easier pre‑processor writing, CSP enhancements, a revamped approach to custom element generation, and IDE productivity boosts such as click‑to‑definition and more reliable auto‑imports.

More details: https://svelte.dev/blog/whats-new-in-svelte-july-2023

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.9 released

GitHub Enterprise Server 3.9 adds features to improve collaboration, observability, and workflow efficiency, including time‑based project views, issue forms, roadmap layouts, automated tools, secret scanning, code scanning, and Kubernetes‑based Actions Runner Controller support.

For full release notes see: https://github.blog/2023-06-29-github-enterprise-server-3-9-is-now-generally-available/

Linux kernel 6.4.1/6.3.11/6.1.37 released

The latest Linux kernel updates (6.4.1, 6.3.11, 6.1.37) were published on July 1, fixing multiple vulnerabilities and bugs. Users are encouraged to apply the updates from the official repositories.

http://git.kernel.org/cgit/linux/kernel/git/torvalds/linux.git

Or download from the kernel website: https://www.kernel.org/ Uno Platform VS Code extension adds mobile debugging

Uno Platform, a framework for building native mobile, desktop, and WebAssembly apps with C# and XAML, released a new Visual Studio Code extension that supports building and debugging mobile applications directly from VS Code, including breakpoints, conditional breakpoints, exception breakpoints, and message logging.

The extension also offers code completion, XAML hot‑reload, and upcoming C# hot‑reload, and enables remote debugging of iOS or macOS apps from Windows or Linux machines.

Community feedback has been positive, with over 10,000 downloads and high ratings on the VS Code Marketplace.